daniel-lim.co.uk

Well, it’s done. Ok, so perhaps it’s not done as in there’s a tiny bit of animation missing, but I’m not going to work on it any more. It’s been a fun project but I’m disappointed that lots of stuff got in the way of me starting animation and as such it’s perhaps not as polished as I would like. I was actually pleased at how well it came out on the big screen at MPC - much better than on a small monitor or TV in fact, so that was good. I’d just like to reiterate my many thanks for everyone that has helped me to complete this project, be it in the form of actual assets (such as sound design) or just giving me suggestions and advice.

• My tutor, Phill Allen
• My housemates
• Vangelis Papageorgiou (Music)
• Efthimis Tikellis (Sound Design)
• Scott-Harrison Sargeant (Screenwriter)
• My family
• Anyone on any forum that may have given their input on my project

Thank you all.

Screenshots (video link at the bottom of the page):

And now without further ado, I give you Nightshift.

I’ve got all my sodding frames rendered out from Shake and looking sexeh, but now I have to wait a whole f*cking hour to copy the 4.4GB worth of images from my area to the media machine. Of course, I didn’t have enough space in my area, so I rendered out to the transfer drive. Then I find out that you can’t copy the files from transfer to the media machines, so then I have to make space somewhere on my area and copy them back! Gah! This is so ridiculous, I just want to be done with this project and forget about it!

/rant

Phew. Sorry about that. Just venting. Hopefully Marie will be coming soon and my DS will be winging it’s way into my loving arms. In the meantime, I may carry on with the website design stuff I’m working on. Having been using Dreamweaver for so long now though, it feels really painfully slow to code it by hand, particularly when you don’t get an immediate visual feedback to changes you make.

I don’t really have much else to say, I’m just killing time. Because this post has been more or less all negative and depressing, I shall reward you for reading with a “shaked”/”shook”/”shaken”(?) image of my major project: ENJOY!

Right-click & “Save As…” to download dl_mp_animUpdate_002.mov (1.35mb)

The hallway sequence! My first ever (proper) walk cycle! Pretty pleased with how it’s turned out. There’s a few things I intend to change (after I’ve done the rest of the mammoth amounts of animation required), but on the whole it’ll do for now. Spent a long time trying to not make it as bouncy and think it’s just about there, but there’s still something bothering me about it - can’t work out what it is… perhaps the arms still move too much? If you know, please tell me!

Ok, here we go, quick and dirty post:

Right-click & “Save As…” to download dl_mp_animUpdate_001.mov (1.76mb)

I actually animated this after Animation Update #2, but since this was rendered first, it existed first. I actually managed to animate the entire sequence yesterday (not including the blocking - that’s been there for a few weeks of course)! That’s 500 frames of animation goodness (efficiency, not necessarily good animation! ;)). Makes a wonderful change to the past few days where I’ve had so much stress it was impossible to do any work. This has now been helped further by my tutorial with Phill where he basically told me not to worry, so I feel much better now!

For the record, this shouldn’t be classed as “Finished Animation” just yet. It’s at a stage where I’m happy with it and should start doing something else. I fully intend to go through again later and make any small fixes prior to final rendering - so if spot anything, let me know!

It seems the server is now back up and all is almost well! Here’s what IT had to say:

The NCCA BA third year’s file server became read-only on sunday night. This is a fail-safe state that is activated when the OS suffers repeat write failures to the hard drive, this prevents corrupt or unreliable data being written. Bad block tests and a file system check have been run on the terra-byte plus array and we have now remounted the volume with write access. It is important to consider this volume at risk for the next few days while we watch it to determine if there is a fault with the hardware. During this time it is advisable that the students keep track of the backups of their most recent and most important work as this server is not backed up. For information: we can account for one corrupt file so far, which may be unrelated and only detected by the full filesystem check.

So there you have it. It’s working, but it could break at any time… the message being that you should make back-ups and do a lot of saving! Still no word yet on the extension rumour.

It would appear that one of the server disks at university has died in the face. As I write this post, I’m using a shitty version of Firefox on the local accounts that seems to crash every time I press the right arrow button on the keyboard. It’s annoying. It means I must write perfectly. Or save often.

I’m killing a bit of time between collecting my Memento DVD from my music designer and my tutorial with Phill at 2pm. I really must go home soon and pick up the renders I’m doing so that he can see them. What’s that you say? You’ve not seen any renders from me? Have no fear, they will be up post haste (as soon as they’re done in fact). As I will explain later, I had a couple of good days then a deluge of really shitty days where I got very little done and then I had a great day yesterday where I polished off 500 frames of (as far as I’m concerned at the moment) finished animation. Yay!

So anyway, the main point was that it’s likely we’ll have an extension at least until 15th Monday but that has yet to been confirmed by Ari. I’m pretty sure that’s great news! I think. It’s not like I’ll be revising 3 days after major project hand-in, is it?

More updates soon, including how depressing it is that my site is overrun with crawlers and bots.

It occurred to me yesterday, after a response from someone on the Portsmouth University animation forums, that no one outside my house has actually seen my finished character model. So here it is; I ran off some ambient occlusion renders last night (ambient occlusion makes everything alright ;)). It’s basically finalised - I’ve done some skinning and got some blendshapes already, so the only thing that is likely to be added is a bit more hair and I’ll probably just have that as separate geometry, skinned exclusively to the head joint. Oh and the gun holster isn’t finished yet!

Right-click & “Save As…” to download dl_mp_charTurnaround.mov (2.49mb)

And speaking of forums, you will probably be aware that the NCCA forum is having a few troubles at the moment. The domain registration has run out and we’re having some troubles sorting out a new one. Keep checking back and I’ll try and provide details as and when they come in!

Kick your shoes off, take it easy! Nope! No time for that, but I must admit I am procrastinating a little. I’ve relaxed the animation curves to check for any crazy rotations and they’re all fixed now apart from the FK controls, which I’m not worried about and the guns (they’re being done in a different way later). Now I should be re-stepping the curves and starting to build more detail in but I’m suffering from the “reaching a big milestone and finding it hard to begin the next mile” syndrome. I do have a tutorial tomorrow as well, so I should probably re-render off everything I’ve got so I can show Phill, rather than panic and run around like a mad man (the norm).

Anyway, I thought I’d let you see how cool it is in full (floaty) motion - yes I have already removed any craziness but this section that I’m showing was the best bit and needed hardly any fixes at all:

Right-click & “Save As…” to download dl_mp_relaxedCurves.mov (1.2mb)